The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization by Victor Davis HansonUniversity of California Press | December 22, 1999 | English | ISBN: 0520209354 | 687 pages | PDF | 7 MB

For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the Greek city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the vast majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not merely the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm.

The author attempts to dispel the stereotype of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages as being an institution of "corruption, ignorance, repression, and stagnation." His examples include the Church's involvement in the preservation of literature, the support of art and architecture, the revival of codified law, the advancement of science, and the invention of charity…

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and his master's, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His books include the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Regnery), How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery), The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Lexington), and The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era (Columbia University Press). He is also the editor of The Political Writings of Rufus Choate and of a 2003 edition of Orestes Brownson's 1875 classic The American Republic.

Our purpose in this course will be to examine the foundations of Western Civilization in antiquity. We will look at the culture of the ancient Hebrews, of the ancient Greeks, and of the Romans, and we will likewise look at how these cultures interacted with each other, sometimes happily, sometimes not. In the process we will focus on how the questions they addressed and the answers they found live among us and continue to shape our lives to this very day. For in a very real sense we are all of us, as participants in Western culture, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans still.

We will for the most part be paying attention to events taking place and ideas coming to birth in the Mediterranean basin, the fundamental homeland, or cultural hearth of Western Civilization from about 1200 BCE, before the Common Era, to about 600 CE: that is to say, from about the time of the events memorialized as the Trojan War and the Exodus to the end of Antiquity, when the Western Roman Empire, if not the Eastern, was a cherished memory, but little more.

* Why study the foundations of Western Civilization, as opposed to the foundations of other civilizations, such as Japanese, Inca, or Hausa, as the case may be? * Studying the foundations of Western culture is a way of coming to know not only where we come from, but who we are. * How did the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans contribute to Western Civilization? * The Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, both in their lives and in their writings, wrestled with questions none of us can avoid. How should we live? Does the world finally make sense, or are things finally and irrevocably random? Where are we going and what is our purpose? * What distinguishes Western Civilization (or Civilizations) from other Civilizations?